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Two Masters Meet in Amsterdam

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Judy Fayard Special to The Wall Street Journal

Updated March 3, 2006 12:01 a.m. ET

AMSTERDAM -- Rembrandt Van Rijn was only four years old when Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio died in 1610 at age 39. It's unlikely Rembrandt ever saw a Caravaggio painting -- he never made the traditional artist's voyage to Italy, and no original Caravaggio is known to have appeared in Rembrandt's native Leiden, or in Amsterdam, where he spent most of his life.

But the young Rembrandt did come to know the works of Dutch artists from Utrecht who had traveled to Rome and become caravaggisti. The volatile, renegade Italian...